Unseen Photo Fair Amsterdam: Margarita Gluzberg

The Russian photographer explains her 'The Consumystic' series, shown at the Dutch expo

Moscow-born artist Margarita Gluzberg artfully produces compelling pieces that - through painting, drawing, projections, performance, photography and installations - look at the reality of human relationships in the modern world. For her photo series 'The Consumystic,' Gluzberg focused on the complexities of the allure in consumerism. By double and triple-exposing the film, Gluzberg's work has a hazy magical glow that picks up on the veneer of surfaces and the opulence of commodities to create a dialogue between the product, the image, the viewer and the commercial environment. For the Unseen Photo Fair Amsterdam, Gluzberg presents a close look at this ongoing body of work.

They are records of a kind of hallucinatory journey through the city: layers of images - shop interiors and windows, department store escalators, make-up counters

Speaking of the series, Margarita Gluzberg told Dazed Digital: “The Consumystic (Winter), is the second in a series of 80 slide projections. The first was The Consumystic (Autumn). Both are records of my own encounters with fashion displays, and mimic the fashion seasons. They are records of a kind of hallucinatory journey through the city: layers of images - shop interiors and windows, department store escalators, make-up counters. The slide projector takes on the role of a drawing mechanism, while the shimmering graphite ‘silver screen’ makes the image both resonate and disappear at the same time, echoing the fleeting nature of material satisfaction.

The Platinum prints, with their unique shimmering blackness are another manifestation of the image mesh. They have a Time Machine quality - the photographs depict a completely contemporary world, through a filter that manufactures a temporal displacement.”